Abstracts
Keynote: LInda Stupart
After the Ice, the Deluge: Queer Ecologies, Leaky Boundaries, and the Melting Polar Ice Cap
After the Ice, the Deluge is a long term practice-based project, figuring relationships between the melting polar ice caps and other traumatised, abject, alien, and outsider bodies - queering the question of survival towards less boundaried ways of being in crisis.
The work has developed to investigate melting polar ice caps both as traumatised bodies, and as precarious, dying, containers for other traumatised, queer, and outsider bodies.
This paper proposes a kinship between the melting polar ice caps (leaking, chaotic) and queer, sick, and traumatised bodies. Moving beyond establishing this empathetic relationship, this performance-paper traces strategies for living ethically in death worlds (as in the AIDS crisis) and sick worlds (as with chronically ill bodies) and practices of closeness and intimacies against and without the futurity the ecological crisis so clearly deems impossible.
Throughout the presentation I will be sharing work in progress developed on a research trip to the Arctic Circle, which focussed on becoming the alien, virus, bacteria, corpse increasingly appearing from underneath the (melting) ice.
Linda Stupart is an artist, writer, and educator from Cape Town, South Africa currently living in Birmingham, UK.
Stupart’s recent work thinks through climate change, embodiment, abjection and the transgression of borders. They have performed as and on top of icebergs in the Arctic Circle (2019); and are currently walking the length of the River Cole in Birmingham, dressed in natural-dyed rags; foraged plants, twine, vines, and trash collected on the river’s banks as part of Watershed (2021 - present). In 2019 they produced All Us Girls Have Been Dead For So Long with Carl Gent – a full length sci-fi musical theatre production about dolphins, aliens, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, climate change, queer bodies, Kathy Acker, and travelling to hell. This was performed at the ICA, London. In 2021 they worked with Carl Gent and Kelechi Anachua to produce and then, a harrowing - a major immersive exhibition at Wysing Arts Centre, which unearths dominant and dominating relationships between bodies and ‘land’; proposing new ways of being together within ecological crises via ghosts; horses; harrows; rivers; folk singing, and digging. The work is generally driven by a radical site-specificity; immersing themselves in the ecologies; histories, and fictions of the immediate environment, while unearthing and troubling straight(forward) narratives of place. Stupart’s work consists predominately of performance, film, writing and sculpture,
Panel 4: Voicing and Personification as Method